“He was a curious artist, oriented in many directions; highly talented in sculpture and imaginative in form, he assimilated the historical, traditional, contemporary, modern and even the ethnically exotic in his own work”. With these words, the Dresden-based sculptor Stefan Dürre aptly summarised the work of his almost forgotten predecessor Emil Moeller (1885-1958). The present marble urn underscores this characterisation while presenting a little-known aspect of his sculptural activity.
Moeller was born on 8 August 1885 in Neustadt near Coburg, where his artistic talent was discovered at an early age, enabling him to attend the local industrial school. In 1899 he began an apprenticeship in a Düsseldorf sculpture workshop and caused a sensation with his first works. In 1903 he became a master student of Robert Diez at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. A year later he received the coveted Rome Prize for his sculpture of a youth balancing on a sphere, which enabled him to spend several years in the Eternal City and to set up a small studio. The artistic heritage of Antiquity as well as journeys through Italy and North Africa shaped Moeller’s formal vocabulary, of which the urn bears impressive witness. Thanks to a signature, it can be dated to 1912, a time when his works were increasingly gaining international recognition at major art exhibitions in Rome, Dresden and Berlin. Larger commissions induced Moeller to return to Dresden in the same year. The local museums also acquired selected works soon afterwards, including this one.
The basic form of the urn is comparable to a hydria, an ancient jar that was commonly used to store water, but occasionally also for grave goods. Moeller’s work is most likely based on the latter. Unfortunately, there is no further information about its context, but it is known that he did create grave monuments, such as the ones for the Urnenhain in the Dresden district of Tolkewitz. The half-relief on the outside of the urn body, which depicts four symmetrically arranged figures enclosing each other with wreaths of honour, also suggest such an installation. They cannot be identified, but seem to invoke deities from Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Nordic mythology. Stylistically, the urn represents the continuation of Classicism in Art Nouveau and Art Deco.
Text: Alexander Röstel